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Want to give your cozy bathroom that dingy, public toilet feel? Buy Kleenex Hand Towels!
Yes, it's true. While the Kleercut company blithely hit the environmental rock bottom a long time ago, it appears Kleenex has now decided to apply itself and start to dig. Clearly, clearcutting old growth forests simply wasn't low enough for the multinational corporation -- so finding new disgustingly wasteful and unnecessary products that massacre more trees was in order.
Enter Kleenex Hand Towels. Why dry your hands in plush organic cotton towels when you can wipe them on scratchy paper instead, grungy airport style? Well, according to Kleenex, those fluffy towels you've been happily using all your life are riddled with germs that could make you ill at any moment! Watch the original commercial:
As you can imagine, that commercial raised an uproar among green bloggers, some of whom are actually trying to carry personal hand towels to public restrooms, much less bring paper towels home. I first heard about the commercial from Rosemary Brennan of Ro Ro Ro Your Blog and Glamour's Smitten blog, who emailed me a asking "Have you seen this awful new Kleenex commercial?"
Enviro-vloggers quickly picked up on a parody of the Kleenex commercial, showing exactly how wasteful Kleenex's new product is:
That video's very heartfelt -- but the eco web responses I've really been loving are the snarky ones, like Bethany Jean Clement's post on The Stranger. Quoting liberally from Kleenex's website, Bethany pokes fun at the company's marketing pitch:
The "Innovative dispenser delivers one towel at a time" —we're familiar with this paper-towel-delivery technology, actually. And it may be lodged on top of any existing bathroom towel rack, where it will "fit in seamlessly with any decor" -- that is, making your bathroom at home 127 percent more like the one at a gas station! Seamlessly!
Heather the EnviroMom gets sarcastic too. "Think about it: you've all dried your CLEAN HANDS on the SAME TOWEL. What are you, savages?" Then Heather goes on to point out that the germophobia Kleenex is promoting is actually harming our health, not improving it:
This is just another mind game developed by a big old corporation who wants to cash in on all the germ fears created by big old corporations -- antibacterial soap, disposable cleaning wipes, yadda. In doing so they are destroying our environment with tree-killing, greenhouse gas emission-spewing, landfill-populating disinfecting products (that actually make germs stronger) that generate the 'need' for more inane products.
Thanks to Heather, I found Good Green Witch, written by Bridge, who took Kleenex to task on its claim that "The CDC guidelines for hand washing recommends hand drying with a single-use towel." After reading some vague recommendations on the CDC website about using a paper towel or air dryer in PUBLIC facilities, Bridge contacted the CDC for more info -- and the CDC called back:
A very nice doctor asked about the product in question. I told her what it was and gave her the site. She went to it. I could hear the skepticism in her "Hmmmmm..." tinged with faint amusement. I directed her to the pages that loosely quote CDC guidelines. They use them in such a broad term as to think they might have gotten away with it. I explained to her that I felt Kleenex's use of the guidelines was alarmist and misleading.
She was definitely landing on my side with this one. She assured me that she was unaware of any recommendations the CDC would make about HOME towels, but that the CDC is a big place, and she would make sure this was brought to the attention of the proper people to see if there are nefarious doings afoot here. (OK, those are my words, not hers, but that's the gist.) I trust her to do so. After all, she called me.
So there you have it: Kleenex's new product is NOT an effort to help you make your home meet CDC health guidelines. It is simply a pointless money-sucking product that'll leave you $2.99 poorer every 60 times you wash your hands. If that money drain has you washing your hands less to save money -- Well, then you really would be going against some CDC
